Democracy and the Politics of Attention in the Digital Age

In the digital age, attention has become a major issue of public concern. The emergence of various contemporary phenomena – including new digital architectures, new ways of monetizing them, and nefarious actors who have co-opted them – have led many people to argue that our attention is being stolen, fractured, and even traded on the open market. But, while these claims are becoming increasingly prevalent, attention remains an understudied concept in democratic theory. In this paper I work to pull out the relationship between attention and democratic politics in order to help us understand and contend with what is being called the “crisis of attention”. Primarily using the works of William James and Erving Goffman as a roadmap, I argue that it is through attentional fields that participants in democracies establish and negotiate the epistemic terrain from which possible actions are drawn. The upshot of this argument is that attentional fields can be a key resource towards the mobilization of democratic agency, but the erosion or manipulation of attentional fields can also be a vehicle through which democratic agency can be fractured, altered, or distorted.